Blog

Appointment reminders

10 October 2018

Missed appointments a huge problem across industries

Find out how to significantly reduce no-shows with text message appointment reminders, which can improve your cashflow, staff productivity, business efficiency and result in greater customer satisfaction.

Missed appointments are a challenge for any business, particularly those relying heavily on pre-booked appointments: healthcare, allied health services such as dentistry and optometry, hospitality, beauticians, veterinarians, hairdressers, social services, home repairs, real estate, personal trainers/sports clubs and automotive repairers.

Your customers don’t always understand the impact of missing an appointment without letting you know. They are simply unaware that you are often unable to offer this time to another customer to reclaim the lost revenue.

But no-shows can result in a significant loss of revenue for your business, and can lead to reduced productivity, poorer customer service, a loss of trust in your organisation and other negative effects.

How big is the problem?

No-show statistics are high across many industries, especially when extrapolated over a year.

For example, 1.1 million small to medium sized businesses in the UK spend 40 million minutes every day dealing with no-shows, a figure which covers missed time plus time wasted in re-organising appointments.

The tourism industry refers to the ‘plague of no-shows’ that ‘seriously affects the profits of the whole tourism industry’ and is one of the industry’s most significant problems.

The real estate industry, both residential and commercial, is heavily dependent on appointments. Many encompass travel to and from a property, which is a waste of time and resources if the customer fails to arrive, so it’s critical that these appointments occur without high cancellation rates.

Non-attendance rates in the healthcare — industry hospitals and other medical specialists such as dentists, physiotherapists, ophthalmologists — have been studied extensively. Overall, global figures consistently report no-show rates of between 15 and 30 percent in outpatient health clinics. In 2018, a comprehensive study found that the average no-show rate globally is 23 percent.